rpm-ostree/doc/administrator-handbook.md

1.4 KiB

Administering an rpm-ostree based system

At the moment, there are three primary commands to be familiar with on an rpm-ostree based system. Remember that atomic is an alias for rpm-ostree. The author tends to use the former on client systems, and the latter on compose servers.

   # atomic status

Will show you your deployments, in the order in which they will appear in the bootloader. The * shows the currently booted deployment.

   # atomic upgrade

Will perform a system upgrade, creating a new chroot, and set it as the default for the next boot. You should use systemctl reboot shortly afterwards.

   # atomic rollback

By default, the atomic upgrade will keep at most two bootable "deployments", though the underlying technology supports more.

Filesystem layout

The only writable directories are /etc and /var. In particular, /usr has a read-only bind mount at all times. Any data in /var is never touched, and is shared across upgrades.

At upgrade time, the process takes the new default /etc, and adds your changes on top. This means that upgrades will receive new default files in /etc, which is quite a critical feature.

Operating system changes

  • The RPM database is stored in /usr/share/rpm, and is immutable.
  • A package nss-altfiles is required, and the system password database is stored in /usr/lib/passwd. Similar for the group database.